My scientific interests are in the field of inference from empirical data, in particular machine learning and perception. In particular, I study kernel methods for extracting regularities from possibly high-dimensional data. These regularities are usually statistical ones, however, in recent years I have also become interested in methods for finding causal structures that underly statistical dependences. I have worked on a number of different applications of machine learning - if you work in data analysis, you get "to play in everyone's backyard." Most recently, I have been trying to play in the backyard of astronomers and photographers.

With the growing interest in (how to make money with) big data, machine learning has significantly gained in popularity. We have published an article in the German newspaper FAZ, discussing some of the implications. Disclaimer: the text that appears above our names was neither written nor approved by us.

1. I recently became co-editor-in-chief of JMLR. I work for JMLR because I believe in its open access model, but it takes a lot of time. During my JMLR term, please don't convince me to do other journal or grant reviewing duties.

2. I am not very organized with my e-mail so if you want to apply for a position in my lab, please send your application only to Sekretariat-Schoelkopf@tuebingen.mpg.de. Note that we do not respond to non-personalized applications that look like they are being sent to a large number of places simultaneously.

We are always happy to receive outstanding applications for PhD positions and postdocs. In particular, we are looking for PhD students with interests in general machine learning (including kernel methods and causal inference) or computational imaging (photography, astronomy, MR).

M.Sc. in mathematics and Lionel Cooper Memorial Prize, University of London (1992)

Diplom in physics (Tübingen, 1994)

doctorate in computer science from the Technical University Berlin (1997); thesis on Support Vector Learning (main advisor: V. Vapnik, AT&T Bell Labs) won the annual dissertation prize of the German Association for Computer Science (GI)